Brenton Fessler joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore why teenagers aren't hiding their digital lives because they're rebellious—they're hiding because they don't feel safe talking, and what trusted adults do next can change everything.

Brenton Fessler

Brenton Fessler is the Lead Pastor of Refuge OC Church in Orange County, California, where he provides vision and leadership for a growing faith community with a strong emphasis on family, discipleship, and community responsibility. With a background in youth ministry and ministry education, Brenton brings deep experience working with adolescents, parents, and church leaders navigating the complexities of formation, trust, and safety in a digital age. In addition to his pastoral leadership, Brenton has taught ministry-related courses and mentored emerging youth pastors, equipping them to build relationally healthy, developmentally appropriate, and ethically grounded ministry environments. As a parent of teenagers himself, he offers a practical, lived perspective on the challenges families face around technology, online identity formation, and risk exposure. Brenton's work reflects a prevention-first, relational approach rooted in grace, accountability, and collaboration between parents, churches, and broader community systems.

Key Points

Youth pastors hold a unique position of trust with teenagers, making them critical partners in digital safety conversations, as students often confide in them before approaching parents about risky online behavior.
The scaffolding metaphor illustrates healthy digital boundaries—parents and church leaders provide temporary support structures that can be removed as young people demonstrate increasing responsibility, rather than permanent fences.
When a 14-year-old discloses risky online behavior, youth pastors should offer to walk alongside them in conversations with parents rather than protecting confidentiality at all costs, because these young people need adult guidance to navigate complex situations safely.
Youth ministry should focus on spiritual formation and relationship building rather than behavior modification, creating environments where students feel safe to make mistakes and receive grace while learning to live righteously.
Churches need to update child protection policies to include digital and virtual environments with the same rigor as physical spaces, including background checks that examine volunteers' online presence and social media activity.
Youth pastors serve as cultural missionaries within church staffs, helping senior pastors understand emerging technologies, social media platforms, and the realities of youth culture that shape the next generation's spiritual development.
The "talk tech every day" initiative from Ensure Justice emphasizes that digital safety conversations must be ongoing and integrated into daily family life, not reactive responses to scary news articles.
Building cross-generational trust requires two-way mentoring where students teach adults about technology while adults provide wisdom and boundaries, creating healthy churches where both generations learn from each other.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Brenton Fessler: The youth pastor decided that the best way forward was to actually call her up on stage and have her publicly announce her pregnancy so he could shame her as if behavior modification was gonna be the true path to her healing.

[00:00:15] But

[00:00:15] Delaney: Teenagers aren't hiding their digital lives because they're rebellious. They're hiding because they don't feel safe talking. What trusted adults do next can change everything. In this episode, you'll hear why talk tech every day matters. How to set guardrails without shame and what to do when a teen says, I can't tell my parents.

[00:00:35] Hi, I'm Delaney. I'm a student here at Vanguard University and I help produce this show. Today, Sandie Talks with Dr. Brenton Fessler. He's the lead pastor of Refuge OC in Orange County with years of youth ministry experience and mentoring youth leaders focused on digital safety and trust building with teens.

[00:00:54] Now here's their conversation.

[00:00:57]

[00:01:03] Sandie Morgan: Reverend Dr. Brenton Fessler, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.

[00:01:10] Brenton Fessler: Thank you, Sandie. It is so good to be with you and I'm delighted. I hope I can add to the conversation, but I'm really honored to be here.

[00:01:18] Sandie Morgan: This isn't the way I usually do this, Brenton. But you read the article that they published in Influence Magazine under the youth pastor column, and the concern is digital safety for our kids.

[00:01:35] So when you read that, did you have a question? Wow. If I could talk to Dr. Sandie Morgan. This is what I'd ask her.

[00:01:45] Brenton Fessler: Ooh, that's a good point. No, I was captivated by the research right off the bat, mainly because in addition to being a pastor that obviously oversees a youth team that interacts with students in junior high and high school. I've got three teenagers in my house. One is about to turn 20 in just a few months.

[00:02:02] But I care about this issue deeply because my wife, Rachel, and I are always thinking about where are they being exposed? And you said, so I just highlighted a few things from the article about how they're forming their identity in this online atmosphere in ways that parents don't fully understand or grasp the impact of that.

[00:02:23] And I was blown away.

[00:02:25] Sandie Morgan: It's difficult for parents to really, truly comprehend because we're not living in that context and we're all in the same house. Yet our challenges are very different. So, and for listeners, I'm gonna put a link to the article in the winter issue of Influence Magazine. So you'll be able to read this and maybe it'll raise some questions and.

[00:02:57] I would recommend is you don't necessarily ask me because this is a foreign language for me as well. but talk to your teenagers. We've got to have daily, a couple years ago at Ensure Justice, what everybody was saying by the end of Saturday is talk tech. Every day. Not once a week, not when somebody reads a scary article, but talk tech every day.

[00:03:29] Kids, you need to make sure your parents understand. You need to make sure your grandparents, wow, Brenton. If you wanna be concerned, go back and listen to the podcast I did about pig butchering, which is how AI is being used to fraudulently steal from your grandmother

[00:03:56] and so grandkids you can have a trade-off day where grandkids, teach grandparents how to be safe online.

[00:04:06] Brenton Fessler: Right. Oh, so true. So true. It's a scary world. And even as a parent, I think about the moments where we first dropped our kids off at school when they were in preschool, and we trusted them to this world that we no longer controlled. And it's the same way, even as teenagers, we give them these devices and in a lot of ways, they ...

362 – Before Teens Hide Online, Youth Pastors Must Build Trust